Context-Aware Energy Saving System With Multiple Comfort-Constrained Optimization in M2M-Based Home Environment

Most previous work in household energy conservation has focused on rule-based home automation to achieve energy savings, with relatively few researchers focusing on context-aware technologies. As a result, user comfort is often disregarded and few solutions handle decision conflicts caused by multiple activities undertaken by multiple users. The main contribution of this work is twofold. First, a comprehensive human-centric and context-aware comfort index is proposed to evaluate how users feel under particular environmental conditions with regard to thermal, illumination, and appliance-usage preferences. Second, the energy savings is formulated into an optimization problem to minimize the total energy consumption, even under multiple user comfort constraints. Short-term evaluation in our simulated home environment resulted in energy savings of at least 28.98%. Long-term evaluation using a home simulator resulted in energy savings of 33.7%. Most importantly, the energy savings in both situations was achieved under multiple user comfort constraints, representing a truly human-centric living environment.